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Bad Reviews

I believe that the reviews section is to provide valuable feedback on a product. You are free to use it to your own advantage to criticize and berate works and services created by others.

However, this does not comes a privilege. It is not something that is pre-packaged and free to be abused.

Negative reviews can be tolerated, with proper reasoning and logic behind the cirumstances leading to the product to be considered as "bad".

This has never been a concern of mine.

However, recently, I have witness the greatest instance of sheer ignorance that has ever manifested itself upon my time as a developer.

Call me over-reactive, but with some context, I am a developer, and customer support is something that I don't experience every day, or want to even begin with.

The product, in this case, is a free Google Chrome extension.

And being a Google Chrome extension, Google allows for a section to allow for users to report issues with the extension...

Which,

Not only was I given the most vague review, it appears that the reviewer did not even care about working with the developer to resolve their issue - there was no support ticket open alongside the review. Instead, it appears that the review is somewhat in the league of spam, or as a result of sheer ignorance.

This wouldn't warrant any attention of my behalf, normally, since my own attention is consumed towards absorbing information out of textbooks.

However, this is the sight of pure ignorance, something that has to change.

My Response

Hi!

If you do actually encounter problems, please open an issue alongside it:

Click on the "Need to report a problem?" link above the review box.

Without doing this, I cannot work towards responding towards issues,

and do not have an official communication channel to contact you.

Think of it this way. I am providing the extension for free for it mainly to benefit myself (since, something, something, age bypass).

However as a side-effect, I end up benefiting the community.

I have looked at the issues that I have observed an issue with flash.

Being more specific to your query would really help clear any issues with the issues that you are facing. as, it may be only a problem that you face alone: "not working at all".

Condescendingly, the best that I can suggest to you to restart your browser?

But no... I have pushed changes, since I do actively use the extension myself, and observed that it attempted to carry out the behaviour of downloading a flash file.

Having a "review" that is more of a technical support question and cannot be resolved easily due to its vagueness

Sounding ignorant in tone (being vague), and being ignorant in action

What should be the most ethical methodology of asking for basic, customer support?

Being clear to your issue, reciting the scenarios that you faced. e.g. "it does not work, the browser states that "you have flash disabled" and tries to download a flash file when I visit the relevant link".

Opening a ticket and finding a way to directly contact the developer to help resolve the bug.

Leaving the review with a clear indicator that you know what the issue is, revealing that you are not ignorant, unlike with a generic "not working at all" (suggesting a localized issue).

As I've mentioned earlier, I am not a person who has experienced customer support at its worst, but when something breaks, I usually tear it apart and try to fix it myself.

That said, I have probably destroyed a lot of things, and so maybe being ignorant and leaving bad reviews may be something that I should consider doing in the future...

Edit: This is not a real blog, I only wrote this post to test out the framework of my site. I'm currently on hiatus from programming and only really do this as a hobby :P

No, it's not hosted on wordpress! The /blog/ part means almost nothing... Visit http://blog.extramaster.net/ for the real deal.. I will be updating the theme to match soon...